Everyone Knows But You
A Tale of Murder on the Maine Coast
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
An FBI agent finds himself in the insular world of a fishing village on the Maine coast where the rules are different—sometimes lethally so.
After his wife and two children are killed in a car crash, Ryan Tapia starts a new life in Maine. But his first case there is a puzzling oddball—the corpse of a fisherman washes up on federal land, while the man’s boat drifts into waters that are part of an Indian reservation. Ryan quickly learns the nuances of Maine life as he delves into two illicit coastal trades: hard drugs and rare fish. Many of the locals are happy to see that particular fisherman dead. What’s more, they are not shy about noting that Ryan must have screwed up pretty badly to be posted to such a remote location as Bangor, Maine.
Undaunted, Ryan works to understand the unforgiving way of life on Liberty Island, where people live by an older, harsher code. Adrift on a sailboat one day, he encounters a man from the Malpense tribe, living as a hermit on a remote island, who witnessed something that fateful day.
In his riveting crime debut, New York Times bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks turns his literary talents to land he knows deeply, from working in the Maine woods and trapping lobsters year-round. Everyone Knows But You is a rich and dynamic crime novel that brings a unique part of America to vivid, thrilling life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer-winning reporter Ricks (Waging a Good War) delivers a crackling procedural about a grieving FBI agent who sets out to solve a murder in Maine. Though Ryan Tapia is still recovering from his wife's and children's deaths in an auto accident, he's assigned to investigate the killing of Ricky Cutts, a lobsterman whose body has washed up on the shores of Liberty Island near Acadia National Park. Renting a cottage on the outskirts of Bangor, Tapia attempts to piece together Ricky's fate. Over breakfast at a diner, a group of locals explain that Ricky was widely disliked—even by his own teenage daughters—and school Tapia on the ins and outs of the fisherman's code. Then Tapia learns that Ricky's boat was found in waters controlled by a Native American tribe, and realizes that he'll have to dig into the fraught relations between white Mainers and their Indigenous neighbors to get the answers he seeks. The sturdy whodunit plot is enriched by the author's firm grasp of his setting and a colorful cast of New Englanders who never veer into caricature. A sequel would be welcome.
